During a time when being eco-friendly and "going green" is the concern of many, how can marketers make sure they're also doing their part? Easy! R-E-C-Y-C-L-E. Recycle content, that is.

Okay, so you won't exactly be saving any trees or anything (unless you quit it with all that direct mail you're doing, which we recommend anyway), but you'll still be making your marketing more efficient. And saving time and effort is still saving something, right?

Here are 5 great ways you can recycle your content and get more traffic and leads for your content creation efforts.

1. Use Ebook Excerpts for Blog Articles, and Vice Versa

Hurting for blog content? Grab an excerpt from one of the ebooks you've published, and repurpose it as a blog post. Recycling ebook content is a great tactic for pulling together a quick post in a time crunch, and it's also a fantastic way to promote your ebooks again. Similarly, you can use the same concept when creating ebooks. Have a series of already-written blog articles on the same topic that can be bundled into an ebook? Even if you have just one article that can make up a section of the ebook you're creating, you'll save some time and effort.

2. Update Old Content

Let's face it: things change. Could some of your older posts use updating? If there is a new development or new advice you can share on a topic you've written about in the post, take the old post, make some adjustments and additions, and publish it as new. The core of the post will likely still be valuable; it may just need a few tweaks to appeal to today's audience. Another trick is to do some analysis to identify your top-performing blog articles. If you notice that a blog article isn't as up-to-date as it could be but is still generating a ton of traffic, leads, or is even ranking very highly for a competitive keyword for your business, don't update it and publish as a new post. Instead, update the content within that particular post using the existing URL to keep hold of its SEO value, and promote that. Some blogging platforms will even allow you to change the publish date, enabling you to keep the URL but show it on your blog as a brand new post.

You can do the same thing with ebooks. Is an ebook you published a year ago somewhat outdated now? Updated it, and re-promote it! This will save you the time of creating a blog post or ebook from scratch while still affording you the benefits of a new article or lead gen offer.

Also considering adding updated calls-to-action to articles that are still generating a lot of traffic to pump up their potential to generate new leads.

3. Promote Evergreen Content

Some of your existing, older content may not need any updating at all and can be re-promoted as is. This evergreen content can be re-shared in social media and linked to in your other content as well. Chances are, if you're regularly publishing content, not everyone will see every new post as it's published. Additionally, newer subscribers of your content likely won't have seen some of your older content, so your evergreen content will actually still be fresh and new to many!

4. Archive That Live Webinar, and Turn it Into an Ebook

Did you host a live webinar on an educational topic in your industry? Don't let it go to waste! First, make sure you take the recording and turn that "Register for the Live Webinar" landing page into a "Download the Archived Webinar" landing page so you can continue to generate new leads from people who missed the live event. Then, consider using that webinar content as the basis for an ebook. It will give you a great starting point, and repurposing your webinar content in text form will appeal to an audience that is less visually inclined.

5. Republish a Guest Post on Your Own Blog

If you're already leveraging guest blogging opportunities to increase your off-page SEO, why not see what else you can get out of that piece of content you've created? Talk to the individual owners of the blogs where your guest posts were published, and ask them if they're okay with you republishing the post on your own blog. Many blog authors will be okay with this, as long as they've had the ability to publish it first and you include a note that the post was originally published on their blog, with a link back to it.

In what other creative ways can you recycle your marketing content?

Image Credit: chrissatchwell